After months of collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the World’s Fair in Osaka, Johannes Fritsch, Rolf Gehlhaar and David Johnson founded the Feedback Studio in 1970 in a rear building in Cologne’s Belgian Quarter; studio and publishing house saw themselves as an artists’ cooperative and an alternative centre for music. Most of the works on this CD were written before the studio was founded and are at the same time documents of the 1960s.
After the rather improvisatory “Duett für Bratsche”, “Bestandteile des Vorüber” (1962) for soprano, low wind instruments and three double basses is the first piece with which the young Fritsch began his career. The texts come from Max Bense’s collection of the same name, published in 1961; the philosopher was one of the first in Germany to generate texts by computer, and in his poetry meaning detaches itself from sound and syntax from grammar. Fritsch applied similar principles of construction to his seven movements, in which precisely notated and improvisatory passages stand side by side; the first is, in Fritsch’s words, “almost serial”. At the centre stands the singer’s Beckett solo, ppp except for a scream on the word “für”; in the last movement, whose notation recalls the graphic scores of Sylvano Bussotti, the musicians also become speakers. At the premiere in 1963, sung by the blind soprano Marlies Giesen under the direction of Oskar Gottlieb Blarr in a concert of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s composition class, several professors left the hall slamming the doors.
The “Nachtmusik” (1963) was written under the impression of Gustav Mahler’s music: melodies from the first Nachtmusik of his Seventh Symphony gave rise to it, and a serial sequence of variations in the middle section demonstrates what Mahler fought against, namely trusting the laws of convention more than productive imagination. Students of the Cologne Musikhochschule play it in an Aula concert of 1980. Fritsch composed “Ikonen” (1964) for Alfons, Aloys and Bernhard Kontarsky. The title refers to the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, in which icons are signs that signify only themselves; yet as memories, the more or less hidden quotations from Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Mahler point to a music history in which they meant something else. New sounds, harmonics and pizzicati turn the fragments into something present, an early postmodern practice.
Fritsch began “Modulation I” (1966), scored like the Trout Quintet, while still a student of Bernd Alois Zimmermann, whose idea of the spherical shape of time helped shape its character. Modulation here means, in general terms, the transformation of one music by another: the piece opens with transposed quotations from Alban Berg (“Lyric Suite”), Arnold Schönberg (String Quartet No. 2 Op. 10), Johannes Brahms (Piano Quartet Op. 60) and Ludwig van Beethoven (String Quartet No. 15 Op. 132); later a passage from Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is also heard. The rehearsal recording of 1967 is played by Franz Josef Maier, Fritsch himself on viola, Siegfried Palm, Paul Breuer and Bernhard Kontarsky. “Sul G” (1970), suggested by Aloys Kontarsky and Karlheinz Zöller for an Electrola record, and “Sul B” (1972) belong to the context of Fritsch’s general harmonics: they work with overtones of a fundamental whose frequencies deviate from the tempered tuning of the piano, producing a kind of overtone colour melody; in “Sul B” the scordatura of the cello underlines the fundamental. The performers determine the order of the short sections; “Sul G” is played by Lesley Olson and Susanne Achilles in a recording of 1996.